


(better than) your head's only medicine

by MagpieCrown



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Anesthesia, Art Included!, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Misunderstandings, Modern AU, Mutual Pining, Sylvain makes an appearance via texts, Veteran Dimitri, anesthesia shenanigans, but in a felix way, dimitri cares a lot, felix forgets to filter everything through anger and dimitri is just an egg, felix is lovestruck, not sure if crack or not!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:55:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24811171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagpieCrown/pseuds/MagpieCrown
Summary: “I have a knife,” the blanket pile says when they’re ten minutes into the drive.Dimitri blinks and tilts his head, trying to look at Felix through the rearview mirror. “I - am fairly certain you don't.”“S’what you do when you’re bein’ kidnapped,” Felix informs him, muffled. “Y’bluff.”*Felix gets his wisdom teeth removed. Dimitri deals with the aftermath. Both are morons.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 22
Kudos: 264





	(better than) your head's only medicine

**Author's Note:**

> So I was sent this twitter post (https://twitter.com/bloomedvillain/status/1273685512470114304?s=20) today, and then I blacked out, and this is the result :")  
> Find me at @magpiecrown on tumblr or @royalcorvids on twitter, I've been drawing A LOT of dmfx

_u pickig felix up rite_

Dimitri frowns down at Sylvain's message, devoid of punctuation and missing a letter or five. It takes him a moment to decipher.

Today, he is tasked with the sacred duty of ensuring that a very drugged Felix makes it home after getting half of his wisdom teeth removed, and it's not a duty Dimitri takes lightly. He's had his car washed and vacuumed, and the floor of the passenger seat is packed with water bottles, heating pads, and ice packs in a cooler. Several folded blankets are stacked in the backseat. Various painkillers fill the glove compartment - he'll still need to check with the clinic staff which ones would be best suited for Felix. Dimitri is _prepared_. 

Sylvain was the one to drive Felix home a few years ago when he had the first two of his wisdom teeth removed. Dimitri… still wasn't around back then. He makes a practiced move to avoid the pang of guilt, but catches himself in time and lets it wash over him instead. 

Dimitri can't fix the past, but he can learn from it. He _is_ learning.

_Yes, I am just about to leave. Do you have any words of advice? :-)_

After a brief pause, the three dots pop up and stay there for a _really_ long time. Dimitri watches them patiently, flexing his fingers around the car keys. 

_nope! have funxoxo_

Dimitri stares in confusion at the short message. What Sylvain lacks in accuracy, he normally makes up for in speed, like a shotgun blast, so the brevity of the message after such a long time makes - little sense. 

*

It really, really should've tipped Dimitri off.

It didn't.

At first, nothing seems amiss. Dimitri has a hazy memory of cranial nerves anesthesia, and the sight of Felix, sitting in one of the plastic folding chairs in the lobby and glaring groggily at nothing in particular, doesn't strike him as odd. There is an angry red tint to the skin along his jaw, and his cheeks are puffing out a bit - probably from the cotton filling his mouth, or maybe swelling up already.

"It took somewhat longer than we anticipated, so he's now pumped full of novocaine," the nurse explains to Dimitri. "He's going to be a bit woozy for some time, and in the next several days his mouth is going to be tender, so - just let him sleep it off as much as possible."

She moves to say more, but Dimitri, anticipating the stream of information and professional jargon, holds up a hand in a halting gesture and asks for permission to take a voice memo.

Felix is sitting in the exact same position when Dimitri is finally done with the nurse and walks over to him. He doesn’t seem to react to or even register Dimitri’s presence, but meekly gets up and follows him out of the building when prompted.

Dimitri helps him get settled in the backseat, covering him with the blankets and buckling the seatbelt over them, and then gets into the car himself.

It’s not a very long drive, but it’s still going to take them about half an hour. Felix slouches lower and lower until he is completely buried in the blankets, and that’s probably not very safe, but Dimitri doesn’t have it in his heart to get him to sit up again.

If he’s lucky, Felix is going to stay out until Dimitri gets to his place. Sylvain is working tonight, so the apartment is going to be quiet, and then perhaps Dimitri will have the chance to get Felix an iced blueberry smoothie from the stand across the street before he wakes up. 

It’s a good plan. However, it does require being lucky. And Dimitri, generally, is not.

“I have a knife,” the blanket pile says when they’re ten minutes into the drive.

Dimitri blinks and tilts his head, trying to look at Felix through the rearview mirror. “I - am fairly certain you don't.”

“S’what you do when you’re bein’ kidnapped,” Felix informs him, muffled. “Y’bluff.”

A dozen of directives for hostage situations rises up from the murky depths of Dimitri’s memory, but something tells him that listing those won’t be useful. So that’s what Sylvain meant with his cryptic message. “Um,” he says instead. “I’m not kidnapping you, I’m taking you to your place.”

“I don’t even know you,” he hears Felix scoff, and Goddess, he _knows_ Felix isn’t himself, this shouldn’t _hurt_. “M’gonna text a friend. They’ll come and help me. One moment.”

Dimitri hears Felix fumble around, presumably extracting the phone from his pocket. A minute later, his own phone buzzes, and a robotic voice filters through the car speakers, stuttering over the typos.

_I’m B-E-I-G-N kidnapped. Send H-L-E-P_

“ _Hm_ ,” Felix says after a beat, somehow packing a truckload of confusion into one syllable.

Dimitri leaves him to ruminate on the implications and focuses on driving.

“You’re a friend,” Felix concludes a few minutes later. “‘Dimitri’, it says.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Dimitri replies, pushing down a smile even though Felix is still in his blanket burrito and can’t possibly see it.

“So. You’re not kidnapping me.”

“I’m not. Like I said, I’m taking you home.”

“D’we live together?”

“No, but your roommate is my friend too.”

“ _And they were roommates,_ ” Felix says in the tone people normally reserve for imparting sacred knowledge.

Dimitri snorts and doesn’t know where the impulse comes from to clarify that yes, in this case, indeed only roommates. Well, he does. But that’s not important, and so he doesn’t voice it.

Felix falls silent after his remark, and a few seconds later, Dimitri’s phone buzzes again, and the speakers come to life.

_False alarm on the kidnapping_

Dimitri is so terribly fond.

He hears shuffling and a rustle of fabric, and then Felix emerges from the blankets.

“So _Dimitri_ , I - oh,” Felix falls silent, and when several seconds later he is still silent, Dimitri throws a quick glance at him - and then has to do a double take, because Felix is _gaping_. Dimitri thinks he can see the cotton balls in the back of his mouth.

“Felix? Is everything alright?”

Felix sits up, strains with his hands gripping the sides of the front seats, and soon his face pops up in the rearview mirror, eyes focused on Dimitri with an almost comical intensity.

“You said we are _friends_?”

Dimitri wasn’t the one to say that, actually, but the thought flies right out of his skull because Felix sounds - distressed?

Disappointed?

“I - yes?” Dimitri offers, unsure of what is upsetting Felix so.

“And for _how long_ have we been friends?” Felix has a pinched, urgent expression on his face. Dimitri is so helplessly confused.

“Well, um,” he swallows, shifts his grip on the steering wheel. “We’ve known each other since we were kids, and then we had - a falling out for uh, a few years,” for seven years, to be exact - the entirety of his military career, and then some, “but in the past couple of years we’ve been - getting better.”

He wrenches his attention back to the road, uneasy. He’s used to them both treading the edge of the slowly closing chasm between them with caution and discomfort and guilt, and having to tell Felix about it so directly is giving Dimitri whiplash.

“A falling out?” even in his drugged state, Felix still zeroes in on the sharpest edges. “What happened - what have I done?”

“You?” Dimitri blinks in surprise. Felix is truly not himself. “You didn’t - it’s a complicated story.”

“Well, it couldn’t have been _you,_ I mean - _look_ at you…” Felix’s face crumples. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe I could’ve done something so bad to you - you - you are so…”

Felix flaps a hand and makes frustrated noises, and then throws himself back against the seats, pulling the blankets back over himself until only his sulking face pokes out. The splotches on his cheeks seem to grow darker - looks like he’s going to have nasty bruises from the surgery.

Dimitri frowns at the car ahead of him. Felix isn’t making much sense, but that’s quite understandable. He doesn’t miss the way anesthesia made him feel, himself.

“Dimitri,” a hurried rustle of fabric, hands patting the blankets and the seats. “Turn the car around. We need to go back to the clinic.”

“What, why?”

“I forgot something.”

Dimitri knits his brows. He remembers Felix specifically saying he’d just take his phone and keys with him, and since the phone is definitely present, that means…

“Did you leave your keys there?”

“Keys?” Felix repeats in bewilderment. “No, I forgot my…” Dimitri looks back just in time to see Felix reach a finger into his mouth. “Oh. Hm. Never mind, turn the car back around.”

“As you wish,” this time, he doesn’t even try to suppress the smile. Felix is just too adorable.

Enough time passes in silence that Dimitri starts hoping that maybe Felix has dozed off again. He cranes his neck to steal a glance, but instead catches a glimpse of Felix’s wrinkled forehead, eyebrows furrowed in a pained expression.

“Wait,” Felix says suddenly. “Wait wait wait. You said - we’ve been growing closer? For a couple of years, you said?”

“Uh, yeah?”

Felix doesn’t offer anything else, and for a minute Dimitri thinks that this was the end of it, but then Felix _bursts into tears_.

“Are you okay?!” Dimitri calls out in alarm, already rifling through the emergency phone numbers and first aid protocols in his head, looking for a spot to pull over. “Felix? Are you in pain?”

“ _Two full years?_ And we are still _friends_?” Felix wails, looking for all the world like he’s just suffered a terrible tragedy.

Dimitri mentally grinds to a halt, scraps the hastily thrown together script, and keeps driving, while his dumb heart seizes up in his chest. He treasures their friendship so much, trembles over it like his greatest treasure, having never expected to even see Felix again, let alone have the honour of calling him ‘friend’, and even - the greatest miracle - quietly entertain the possibility of something more… But if Felix feels differently, if for him it’s a chore or a shackle…

Dimitri really, really doesn’t want to have this conversation, not ever but especially not when Felix doesn’t have a full grasp on reality. He grips the wheel tighter, white-knuckled, fighting off the miserable feeling.

He catches himself holding his breath, waiting for Felix to deal another blow, and that’s when Felix lets out a short, cut-off snore. He’s resting with his head tipped back and his mouth open - and yeah, Dimitri can definitely see the cotton balls.

Dimitri sighs fondly and, once again, focuses on driving. Felix just needs a lot of rest and as much care as he would accept, which isn’t a lot, but it’s something Dimitri can give him, and for now, that’s all that matters.

Soon enough, he pulls up outside the apartment building and coaxes Felix out of the car. Felix keeps one of the blankets wrapped around himself - the one Ingrid gifted Dimitri a year ago, littered with cursed medieval drawings of animals - and Dimitri does love the blanket, but the thought of it hugging Felix’s frame to keep him warm - well.

Maybe Felix has reservations about their friendship, but at least Dimitri can lend him the blanket.

Dimitri locks the car, and when he turns around he’s met with a Felix burrito falling against his chest.

“Oof. Felix…” Dimitri tries to right him, but Felix only wiggles and burrows further, letting out a contented sigh against Dimitri’s clavicle once his head is securely tucked under Dimitri’s chin. “Come on, we’re almost there.”

Felix’s huff is warm on his skin, and Dimitri’s heart thuds, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He stands there, squeezing the keys, sick with hopeless hope from the deceiving simplicity of Felix’s hair tickling his throat, of Felix’s weight leaning on his own.

Felix wiggles again, makes a disgruntled noise. “ _Hold_ me.” 

Dimitri’s lips stretch into a wobbly smile at his grumpy tone, and oh, that he can do, that he can do very easily.

[tumblr post](https://magpiecrown.tumblr.com/post/622113019582955520/am-i-illustrating-my-own-fics-now-why-yes-yes-i)


End file.
